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England's most popular comedian is now a straight man actor in arty movies, writes George Palathingal.

Before The Office introduced us to David Brent, there was another British comic creation bringing excruciatingly brilliant schadenfreude to the television-watching public: Alan Partridge. The middle-aged, Abba-obsessed Partridge was the "chat show host from hell" - a title he truly earned after offending just about all the (fictional) guests on his series Knowing Me, Knowing You.

Between 1994 and last year, the character won his creator and performer, Steve Coogan, numerous television and comedy awards in Britain for writing and acting.

Yet creating an icon of British comedy was never the intended apex of Coogan's career. The Manchester native has always seen himself as an actor. Comedy was originally a means to an end: the end being membership to the actors' union, Equity, in Britain.

"Eighteen years ago I started doing stand-up - which makes me feel old - when I was at drama school, just 'cause I could do impressions and I thought it would facilitate my entry," remembers the genial 38-year-old, who is temporarily LA-based.

"You had to take some stupid backwards route to get into Equity at the time because of their stupid restrictive policies and the only way I could do it was by doing a bit of cabaret.

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"Everyone would do anything they could in a bar, in a pub for wages which would qualify them as being professional. I could do impressions, so I cobbled together a stand-up routine that sort of developed until the stage where I was getting voiceover work and stuff.

"I ended up writing, too, more out of necessity than desire. That developed into Alan Partridge. So that's kind of how it came about - I wanted to create work for myself."

As executive producer, Coogan is the man behind some of Britain's most innovative comedy in recent years, including Human Remains and Marion and Geoff.

Playing comic creations of his own, such as Partridge and student-hating lager lout Paul Calf, helped Coogan "segue back into acting".

"I sort of realised you couldn't just walk into acting," he says. "You had to show people that you could do something sufficiently different that made you interesting from everyone else who wanted to be an actor.

"But I enjoyed it, too. You know, it wasn't like, 'Oh, I hate doing comedy, I want to be taken seriously.' I don't want to play Hamlet or anything like that. I just wanted to broaden what I did or seek out other options, if you like."

Two years ago, Coogan's feature-film career was given a life-changing boost following a starring turn in only his sixth feature since 1989: Michael Winterbottom's dazzling, debauched tale of the late '80s "Madchester" scene, 24 Hour Party People.

"It was really [then] that creative people in Hollywood became interested in me," Coogan says. "My tape started being passed around and, y'know, my shows."

This is why the actor is in LA. As coincidence would have it, the two films he made after 24 Hour Party People are being released in Australia within a week of each other. Last Thursday came uber-hip indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's arty, ultra-stylish Coffee and Cigarettes; next Thursday the colourful, big-budget, Jackie Chan-starring romp Around the World in 80 Days will follow. ("Oh really?" Coogan says with a wry laugh when this news is relayed. "They couldn't be more different.")

Jarmusch's film compiles 11 hit-and-miss shorts where actors and musicians, from Cate Blanchett and Bill Murray to the White Stripes and Iggy Pop, do little more than talk, smoke and drink coffee.

Coogan's segment is unique in that he and fellow Englishman Alfred Molina (from Spider-Man 2) drink tea rather than coffee - "That's kind of an in-Jim-joke," Coogan sniggers - but its scathing wit also elevates it above the other vignettes. Megan Spencer from SBS's The Movie Show described it as being "just about worth the price of admission alone".

In the segment, titled Cousins?, Molina's underachieving actor tries to interest Coogan's "narcissistic, egotistical" actor-on-the-rise in the fact that they are related.

"For the purpose of the comedy we kind of exaggerated the [Hollywood] interest in me and also played with the idea that Fred's career was kind of just meandering along - which is actually quite far from the truth, but we thought for comic effect it would be useful to play that," Coogan laughs nervously.

"It was great because it was all about the performance. [Jarmusch] has his little styling cues and things he likes to throw in, but it was all about what we were doing. So, a very enjoyable modus operandi. It's black-and-white, it looks kind of dirty, grubby. But it is kind of cool, I suppose."

Coogan recently finished a "film-noir-type thriller" called The Alibi in which he stars opposite model-turned-actress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos of X-Men fame. In September he returns to England to play the lead in a new film with Winterbottom. And - whatever it's like - there's no escaping the fact that he was cast as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days.

Steve Coogan, then: finally a leading man?

"The film-crew people here [in LA] just accept me as this British actor," he says, "whereas when I bump into British people and I say I'm playing the lead they kind of raise their eyebrows - like, 'What, you're not being funny?' or 'Why do you get to kiss the girl when you look like Alan Partridge?' And I try and tell them that I only look a bit like him. And my clothes aren't as bad as his in real life."